The Dream the Kicks is a classic account of the prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain. In this new paperback edition, which has been thoroughly revised to take into account recent scholarship of early cinema, Michael Chanan provides a fasciniating account of the rich and hitherto hidden history of the origins of film.
Chanan demonstrates that the theory of the persistence of vision', which led to the invention of moving pictures, has been superceded by modern scientific findings. In its place, he puts forward a theory of invention as a type of bricolage, and...

The earliest films made in Cuba--newsreel footage of the Cuban-Spanish-American War--date from the end of the nineteenth century, but Cuba cannot be said to have had an indigenous film industry before the revolution of 1959. The melodramas, musicals, and comedies made until then reflected Hollywood's--and the United States's--cultural domination of the island, but the revolution precipitated urgent debates about the role of cinema in a socialist country and the kinds of films best suited to the needs of the people and their rulers. Among the feature films, documentaries, and short subjects...

This work on the recording industry covers the ground from Edison's talking tin foil of 1887 to the age of the compact disk. It charts the evolution of recorded sound and asks: what goes on in the recording industry; how does it affect the music; and do we listen to music differently from our forebears because of reproduction?

Thiswide-ranging studytraces the history of the documentary from the first Lumiere films to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'. Chanan argues that documentary makes avital contributionto the public sphere - where ideas are debated, opinionformed and those in authority are held to account.
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"Musica Practica" is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, Michael Chanan explores the communal roots of the musical tradition and the effects of notation on creative and performing practice. He appraises the psychological wellsprings of music using the insights of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Tracing the growth of musical printing and the creation of a market for the printed score, he examines the...